Sutter Buttes, Peach Bowl minors cruise to easy wins
District 2 Little League’s minor baseball all-star tournament continued on Tuesday night with a pair of winners’ bracket games at Sutter Buttes Little League in Yuba City.
In the first game of the evening, host Sutter Buttes scored 16 runs in the top of the third inning and coasted to a 22-7 victory over Olivehurst-linda to improve to 2-0 at the tournament.
Braden Scritchfield helped lead the charge by going 3 for 4 with two doubles, three RBIS and four runs scored, while Wyatt Lane finished 2 for 4 with a double, triple, four RBIS and scored twice. Aden Howard also had a big game at the plate for Sutter Buttes, going 2 for 3 with two triples, three RBIS and two runs scored.
Riley Mckerick went 2 for 3 with a double, two RBIS and a run scored, Jordan James was 2 for 2 with an RBI and scored twice, and Cole Callison hit an RBI double and scored once for Olivehurst-linda. Peach Bowl 23, Colusa 3 Julian Garcia finished 3 for 4 with two doubles and five RBIS, and teamed with Brandon Flores for a no-hitter as Peach Bowl blew past Colusa in three innings in Tuesday’s late game.
Jeremiah Hill went a perfect 3-for-3 with two RBIS and three runs scored, and Flores and Scott Jeppeson both went 2 for 3 with an RBI and scored three times to help Peach Bowl move to 2-0 at the tourney.
Garcia struck out four over two innings and Flores struck out the side in the third to complete the nohitter.
MAJOR BASEBALL Sutter Area 21, Wheatland 1
Jagger Beck hit a triple while driving in three runs, and Brice Stokes struck out four to earn the win on the mound as Sutter Area cruised to a victory over Wheatland in a winners’ bracket game on Tuesday night at Perry Field in Sutter.
EKATERINBURG, Russia – The Mexican heart, that organ shared by 125 million human beings and then some, just spent a Wednesday in a relentless wringer. It knew hope, then dread, then horror, then hopelessness, then elation, then pause, then fret, then hope again, then elation again. It’s a wonder everyone in possession of one of those hearts did not sob. Many did, including Edson Alvarez, who plays for Mexico.
“Too much emotion, man; my heart’s still pumping,” said Luis Omar Tapia, who happened to be broadcasting the Mexico-sweden match in Ekaterinburg Arena for the Mexican network Televisa. He also happened to be the person whose challenged heart caused him to make an odd sound near the end of a 3-0 demolition of Mexico by Sweden, a score capped with Alvarez’s desolate own goal. It sounded like exultation. Soon, on one of the strangest days anybody could spend in a stadium, that sound grew replicated across the vociferous Mexico fans in the stands, where a wavelet of noise rippled across the thousands of prodigious travelers. They had been checking their smartphones from an emotional position of severe hopelessness.
They knew Germany was playing South Korea 450 air miles east in Kazan in a 0-0 scrap. They knew one German goal would complete Mexico’s descent all the way from the top of the Group F to the jet home from the World Cup. They knew Germany would score because Germany is always Germany. As Tapia put it, and so many of them might have, “I didn’t think it was going to be fair that with six points, Mexico was going to be out.”
Suddenly, however, they spotted something implausible. South Korea had scored, in the second minute of added time, so they made a little boom as a mismatch to the fumes of carnage on the pitch.
Suddenly, their quick mirth deflated, because apparently the South Korea goal had gone disallowed.
Suddenly, they rebuilt a kind of a cautiously positive noise, because on video review, the South Korea goal had gone allowed.
Sweden would win the group on six points, but Mexico would push through in second place even on a bedraggled day, and Germany, which had won its group every time since 1990 and won the World Cup in 2014, would depart unforeseeably. In all the stadiums and arenas of all the days and nights, the noise the mixture produced would have to rank among the freakiest.
Mexico manager Juan Carlos Osorio barely noticed, saying he was “very hurt” with how his defense in particular had played, but mostly with how he had coached it, with a team unfit for Sweden’s airborne physicality. He said, “Today my sin was to be a purist,” and, “Maybe one day I’ll get it right.”
Sweden manager Janne Andersson didn’t notice either, so obsessed was he with the game at hand, and with his team’s stout recovery from its harrowing 2-1 loss to Germany in the 95th minute last Saturday night, and so enamored was he with what he witnessed.
“I’m so incredibly proud, almost moved I have to say, how they performed in the entire match,” he said of his team, twice extolling its ethic as “loyal” and saying, “I rarely use too strong a word but I have to say, we’ve done a fantastic job with this match today.”